Rakesh Shetty

Rakesh Shetty, SAP's director of financial services industries, said his company also plans to concentrate its sales efforts on governance, risk, and compliance—areas of focus for CFOs.

"Given the state of the U.S. market, we have more of a footprint coming from the risk side, the CFO side," Shetty said.

Shetty spoke after a press conference in New York last Wednesday, where SAP rolled out SAP Business Suite 7, which essentially breaks down the company's entire portfolio of database products and industry-specific applications into components that clients can buy separately and integrate to add the capabilities they need.

SAP said the strategy enables customers to respond quickly to the economic downturn by buying only the components they need. The company promised no product upgrades from this release for five years, though it plans continuous enhancements.

This strategy would let users bring new components into production in no more than 90 days, Shetty said.